Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Introduction
information on the planned changes and their progress and by engaging
people in the change-related activities (Armenakis et al., 1993; Armenakis
and Harris, 2002). The majority of studies on readiness for change have
examined readiness either as a psychological state measured by surveying
the employee attitudes and beliefs (e.g. Armenakis et al., 1993; Jones et al.,
2005) or as the organization’s general capacity for implementing changes
(e.g. Jansen, 2000). In this dissertation, the concept of readiness for change
is applied to the context of multi-project change programs by examining
how the activities of program initiation build readiness for implementing
the change program.
The current study takes the perspective of a program team that is put in
charge of initiating, planning and managing a large-scale change program.
The aim is to explore how readiness for change program implementation is
promoted by this core team’s actions. The program is viewed as an
emerging temporary organization that interacts with its permanent parent
organization (e.g. Andersen, 2006; 2008; Ekstedt et al., 1999). To study
this interaction, the concepts of organizational boundaries (Leifer &
Delbecq, 1978; Scott, 2003; Thompson, 1967) and boundary spanning
(Aldrich & Herker, 1977; Jemison, 1984) are adopted from organization
theory. Prior research has described how the boundaries of organizational
entities must be constantly maintained and managed (e.g. Ancona &
Caldwell, 1988; 1992a; Miller & Rice, 1967; Scott, 2003). The present study
examines the activities that the key actors of an emerging temporary
organization, a change program, employ in managing the program’s
relations with its parent organization. As these activities not only span the
program’s boundaries but also build and guard them (Yan & Louis, 1999), a
term boundary activities is utilized to refer to all such actions. The aim of
this dissertation is to explore the core program team’s boundary activities
through which the emerging program’s boundaries are defined,
strengthened, bridged and guarded. Boundary activities have been studied
earlier in the contexts of product development teams (Ancona & Caldwell,
1992a), work teams led by external team leaders (Druskat & Wheeler,
2003), and community groups involved in delivery projects (Kellogg,
Orlikowski, & Yates, 2006), but prior research has not explicitly addressed
the boundary activities of change programs.
Although project management literature has mainly focused on
interactions and integration within a project, the early publications already
acknowledged the need to manage the project’s external relations. Among
the very earliest project management publications is the article “The project
Manager” by Paul O. Gaddis, which was published in Harvard Business
Review in 1959. Gaddis described the duties and qualities of project
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